Today’s Words:
seize
greaseball
yo
nutters
bulbous
homeowner’s association
high-falutin

“Yo!” screamed the scrawny crossing-guard. “Are you nutters? That ain’t a toilet!”

The old man looked up from his task, diligent as he was, squatting over the drainage grate at the edge of the street taking a huge and sonorous dump. He looked confused, as if the added input of the guard’s salutation had derailed his feeble ability to focus.

“You can’t do that here! What’s wrong with you?” continued the young man, oblivious to the old man’s obvious inability to comprehend the inadequacy of the receptacle he had chosen for his deposit.

The crossing-guard, whose name happened to be Alan, seized the half naked man’s arm as if to pull him off the street, but mid-pull, thought better of it. Alan had spied the soupy consistency and greenish shade of the old man’s business and decided it would be better to keep his distance.

As if Alan’s touch had awoken something, a smattering of clarity swept over the old man’s face and he seemed to be gathering his few remaining wits about him. He struggled with his surprisingly-clean pants and managed to reassemble himself more quickly than Alan expected.

Now he seemed to be younger than Alan originally thought. There was a strange lurching sensation in Alan’s stomach, and he felt woozy and disoriented.

“Excuse me young man–I’m looking for the Elvish Pinkerton Homeowners Association –might you know where it is?” the not-so-old man asked Alan brightly, with no trace of doddering or crazy.

The man’s offal seemed to have disappeared too. It was as if the incident had never happened, and Alan was thoroughly nonplussed.

He looked more closely at the ground and realized that the grate was only painted on. And the paint looked like it was actually licorice strips.

“I say, did you hear what I asked you?” queried the man again, while great wings unfurled from his shoulders.

Butterflies erupted in Alan’s stomach, and he quickly looked around him. The asphalt now resembled snake-skin slowly undulated under his feet.

“Fuck” he whispered under his breathe. “How did they find me?”

“Now young man, there is no need to swear. If you could just direct me to the Elvish Pinkerton –”

Alan shoved the man, who was now more of a griffin-creature with a bulbous human head attached to a lionish body with talons and wings.

***

OK, I’m bored with this!
Emma

Hank’s poor little hard-on, timid even at the best of times, wilted further as Sue’s narration quickened. She was now hotfooting it through the North Portland and Gresham numbers at full tilt, turning Hank’s noncompliant member into a sheepish, pale extremity at rest ‘twixt his thighs. By the time we got to the East side, the poor little fella had faded into memory.

I had to do something.

But what?

This is where my “stuff” comes up. Oh, I know, this meeting was about Hank, and if I’d read the agenda for the meeting, I might have kept things on track. How much work can it possibly be to service a penis? It’s not an art form for cryin out loud, and documentation abounds on the subject. Okay, sure, I had skimped, and was getting by with version 2.0 of the manual, but it was common knowledge that versions 3.0 and up were really just remakes of the classic 2.0, known in our little circle as the “K&R” of sex.

No, the problem was definitely not the outdated documentation. It was a problem of will, of intention. My head was there, but my heart just couldn’t get down with the idea of servicing Hank’s head. And then there was the matter of my own needs, hunkered down in the corner out of sight, lest Hank should get some fool notion and try to pleasure me again. Oh, it happened a few times, when I first took the position. Hank actually fancied himself a ladies’ man, and told me over a nice meal at Sauro’s that he knew quite a bit about things down under. This accompanied by a nervous wink and then a quick scanning of the room to see if anyone had overheard. Of course they overheard you, Hank, you have a hearing problem, and your volume control is seriously damaged. Two hot lesbians looked over at me from the adjacent table, both with identical we feel your pain…we’ve been there expressions which pushed me so instantaneously down in the dumps that I had to look away.

But I looked back, not once, but many times during the course of the evening. The darker-haired woman, mid-40’s, seemed to be celebrating something that evening. She wore a simple, elegant, understated black dress, and a gold necklace with an amethyst or similar stone in a very elegant setting. Every so often, it seems her emotions could no longer be contained, and at these times she would lean forward to her girlfriend—a gorgeous young woman, with short blond hair cut pixie-style, and impish dimples—she would lean forward, grab her hands, and then take each one into her own, and kiss them, and then laugh, and force me to look away for fear of being caught.

I kid you not, it was as Sue was wrapping up her report, with the traditional action items for the week segment, that I put two and two together, for the very first time. It was those hot lesbians at Sauro’s who had aroused me!

Anyone with a single iota of Sapphic knowledge would have gotten that—at Sauro’s—not here in Hank’s basement at quarter to 10 one year later.

The lesbians had done it! Sue’s speakerphone voice was now taking on the most honey-dewed, lyrical quality, as I had this breakthrough moment. I can still recall the qualit of that misty February light as it bounced off Hank’s gray coverlet, to his laptop computer, and from there to the pile of socks in the corner, a ghoulish play of light in a dreary Bermuda triangle.

I thought Hank had actually aroused me that night at Sauro’s…so I took a chance with him. We dropped by Kinko’s after dinner that night, to pick up the transparencies for my talk the next day, and while standing in line, I playfully grabbed his crotch, giving him the signal that I might just be ready for some down under play.

* * for later * *

(geeze, I love that catch-all word for all that ails womankind).

I knew I didn’t want to bring in the district sales manager, Novela …

… but a memory. By the time we got to the east side, it lay there like a

Today’s Words:
laconic
paper
amorous
lacking
ineffective
get on with
bone

Get on with it! You’ve been lurking in the amorous section of the paper for weeks, cutting out ads, piecing together phrases. If you’re worried about an ineffective presentation you might as well experiment, you’re not lacking in imagination. For fucks sake, Mom!

Young man, go toss out the trash, the ham bone is rotten and stinking up the kitchen. If I wanted advice about the snapshot of prose I am concocting to entertain my theoretical suitors, I’d ask.

Well sooooorry, forgive my forward confession of frustration, I was attempting to catalyze some fornication for my dear mum who seems to extol its virtues daily with nary an indulgence in months.

Well dear, I appreciate your bottomless generosity in that respect.

Well, thank you for that acknowlegement. I apologize for losing my temper with flagrant disregard for your delicate ears. I’ll get on that trash removal request posthaste.

Sigh, what a dandy son I have. What folly have I for flirting with witless men, when I have such an lovely specimen in my own domicile.

Oh but mother, it hardly compares. You can’t fuck me you know.

Oh my heavens of course not. Forgive the comparison. I only meant in terms of attention spent, my cost/benefit analysis returns a high ROI ratio on time spent with you.

I’m flattered and glad. Come my dear mum, let’s have a picnic.

Splendid, let’s.

Margo rolled her eyes and stormed out of the room. Whatever, Mom. As if I need your permission to fly. The very ability made her free in a way her mom could not comprehend. When her nubby winglets had finally unfurled, after weeks of agonizing yearning, her parents had been duly flummoxed. She was lucky it was summer and they were eating out on the patio – the dramatic opening of her shiny iridescent wings and subsequent flight would have been far less impactful if she’d had to get up from the dining room table and walk outside first, making sure they all followed. Instead she simply waited for the right moment, somewhere between asserting her independence and giving a withering diatribe on the impossibility of tbeir even attemting to curtail her freedom and then WHUMP she was wingful and then WHOOSH she was gone.

Now, of course, she had to deal with the fallout. Sigh.

Just her mom of course. Her dad was busy investigating the last uptick in the market, and her brothers had long since gotten over ther initial surprise. After all, wings were quite common alterations nowadays. It didn’t make her so special. Just because it wasn’t Orthodox didn’t mean it wasn’t done.

Just tell that to her mother.

“You know you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetary if you have genetic modifications!” her mom yelled after her.

As if she cared. Why would she care to be bound by a bunch of stilted old rules when she could soar through the sky? If God didn’t want her to have wings, He wouldn’t have invented Cosmetic Genetics.

Her wings were something between a bat and a dragonfly, and her bone structure and composition had been modified as well in order to make her lighter. She’d had to keep her wingnubs concealed for some time as they grew in. Man did they itch. But it had been worth it.

As long as her mom didn’t do something psycho and lock her in the cellar.

She wished she could pick her mom up and carry her with her as she flew, to show her the amazing feeling of being airborne. But she wasn’t nearly strong enough to carry a full human, even a skinny one like her mother. The supplements the cogen company gave her were filling out her shoulder muscles but it would still take time to grow that much muscle.

But someday, she would do it. She would show her mom what it feels like to fly.

She wasn’t naive enough to think that it would change anything. Her mom would still be anti-cogen and would harp on her everytime she came home and give her pamphlets about the Natural Humanity movement. But maybe, just maybe, the little girl that still lived in her mom would feel glee, soaring above the city, being carried by the wind–and that would make it worth it.

Marla was quite motivated to solve the gnat mystery because of her father. He had been a database programmer on Solus IV in the last half of the 25th century, where her parents were from originally, before the relativistic effects of time travel had landed them on this colony world several centuries later (although only a decade or so older). They decided to move not only because of the high tax rates on Solus IV, but most importantly, because her father continually wanted to drive nails into his skull to distract himself from the pain of explaining data normalization to the natives, who were not much more advanced than very clean chimpanzees. No, her father would yell, not even chimps. Donkeys! Chimps at least you could teach to spell short words!

Occasionally he would suffer from flashbacks, and scream in agony about primary keys and referential integrity. He would toss and turn in his sleep and yell out ”NO, YOU JUST DON’T GET IT!” and then whimper about how sorry they’d be if they ever tried to get data out of that table and how they would come crying to him and he would, well, goddamn it he would fix it, because that was his job. And then he would start wailing, until he finally tired himself out and fell back asleep.

All in all Marla referred to avoid being present for these episodes. She also tried to avoid the long lectures with neatly labelled charts of tables and fields and arrows delineating one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships between data types. She was not a chimpanzee (or a donkey). She shared half the genes of a brilliant database programmer and had understood it all quite well several years ago. But her father, suffering from a condition only recently added to the DSM-XVIII and labelled as “Intelligence Disparity Stress Syndrome”, was unable to encode new memories of people actually understanding and following along with his train of thought. The syndrome affected the ability for the sufferer to encode new positive memories, and instead the mind replayed an endless loop of intellectual frustration. There was no known cure, although some therapies looked promising. Sadly, none of them were available on their little colony world.

Marla, therefore, was eager to solve the gnat problem. 

She wanted to resume  her normal routine of trumping through the forest, chatting with the birds and munching on miner’s lettuce and seepa grass. She found the local flora to be quite tasty. Unlike her father’s cooking, which was less than toothsome. She didn’t think that had to do with his IDSS – he was just an awful cook. Her mother had been a good cook, according to her father, but she had dyed in the voyage and Marla could barely remember her anymore.

[Author's note: I feel tired. I don't know what to do with the gnats. Perhaps she finds a way to avoid them by smearing a special paste on herself that she learns about from the birds, who yes, speak Common quite well. Or perhaps she develops some psychic ability to communicate with them and asks them nicely to please go buzz somewhere else. Maybe her mom isn't dead after all and somehow figures in. Maybe ... <sigh>. So many possibilities. But I chafe at the obligation to finish the story and wish to abandon my nascent plotline posthaste. So I will leave it in your hands, dear reader, to determine how Marla shall be delivered from her gnat problem (and her father problem).]

Today’s Words 
varnish
slip
grandmother
pleather
supreme
inquietude
splash

The varnish on my heart isn’t so easy to remove. I’ve scrubbed, but it’s insistent. I sometimes think I’ll end up in a monastery, joking with the monks and planting beets. Spending my mornings in the garden, and my afternoons scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing at my heart, gently working my way through the coatings of lacquer. Years will go by, slowly, the world swirling around me, forgetting me, a quiet scrubber, diligent in my task, until every coat is gone. I will emerge then, clean and clear, a brilliant light radiating from my chest, warming the world.

I think my grandfather is dying. He had cancer and it’s back. I would go and see him, but I don’t want to deal with my grandmother. How’s that for varnishy? She starts to tell me stories and I am filled with a gritty inquietude. I want to scratch at things, as if I’m a wild cat caught in a trap, trying to claw my way out. I can’t take it. I think that’s how I would feel in a monastery right now too. But maybe someday. Something in me longs for quiet early mornings. I don’t especially like sitting meditation though. Perhaps I’ll just buy a cabin up by a lake, and every morning go and sit by the water, watching the small tide lap at the edge, and the birds will come nearer each day as my body becomes part of the landscape.

In the summer, I will swim nude and become cancerously tan. I will make videos of myself each morning, speaking some small words of faith and magic, and post them on YouTube. Then I will walk by the shore and teach myself to skip rocks on the water without making a splash.

Then once a month, I’ll pull out my pleather and black lace and go into town and dance until morning. I will write about the wild in the city and the wild in the wild and how much the world is missing itself.

Eventually I will slip outside of myself. I will be swimming one day in the lake, my nipples hard from the chill water, and suddenly I will be the water, and the fish, and the birds, and I will stop posting on YouTube because I will be gone, dissolved into the wind and the water and the dirt.

And people will complain, and become annoyed at my absence. One will write a long essay on the necessity for consistency in branding. Most will just click click click on to the next guru vid. But a few will miss me, and trek up to the cabin and try to find me. They will walk along the shore and one will hear a whisper, and then they will all hear it. Not words so much, but a feeling that they know, the essence of a cheeky girl who believed as much in God as in the world and finally became both. They won’t know how to explain it but they’ll know that they’ll never find my body so they will go back to the world, carrying just a bit of magic back with them. But one will stay, for a time. She will talk to the wind, and say that she thought I would come back someday. She would remind me of the twin rocking chairs in the retirement home that we would joke about, and I will whisper that I would, but not having a body makes it not so practical and she would smile to herself. But, I will whisper, I will be there. In the sun, in the wind, in the sparkling eyes of the babydyke intern who wants to change doctoring, make it more about feeling and spirit and less about machinery. I will be there, and you will feel me. So go, feel the sun on your face, and love the world with your smile. I will be there.

Today’s Words:
boiled egg
unripe
sated
tush
T-square
dope
decisive 

Angie was so anal she used a T-square to fry an egg. Got to get the angles right she said. Only way to do it.

Boiled eggs she wouldn’t attempt. Too many variables she said. Higher longterm success rate if you stick to known equations.

She chose slightly unripe fruits and vegetables because they produced more precise slices. We didn’t point out that the edibility factor should be counted in the overall success score. We didn’t want her to break down on us.

Overall she was a good kitchen unit. A little limited by her high perfectionism quotient, but better than the domers we heard about  whose unit was so sloppy that they got poisoned by old fragger meat. They were doped up for weeks recovering from the gutrot. That unit got recycled pronto. And due to strikes among the robobrain factories, they had to wait three weeks to get a new one. They couldn’t even salvage their custom food rules because they were afraid they were contaminated somehow by whatever made the unit sloppy. Three years of individuation lost.

So we were pretty happy with Angie all told. That’s why we were a little worried when she got in into her CPU to round out Mom’s tush. Units were given rudimentary goal-setting abilities to encourage industry. But why on earth she thought it would be beneficial for Mom to have a rounder butt, or want to semi-secretly feed her fattier foods was beyond us. (She couldn’t really do anything in secret – secrets being programmatically impossible in robobrains. But she could tell us kids and not Mom. This was to make surprise parties possible, but created some interesting loopholes. Of course if Mom caught on and asked directly Angie couldn’t lie. But she didn’t have to volunteer her scheme either.)

We asked Angie why, and she said Mom’s bony ass was harming her by making it less pleasant to sit and her less likely to get laid and it was her duty to prevent injury if at all possible. She seemed very decisive, so we let it go. We had no idea what kind of trouble would arise from that tiny decision. Of course we also had no clue that Angie had counted on us being sated from the extra serving of cream-puff-burritos she had given us, and thus unlikely to argue.

Yes, that was the beginning of the end for humankind as we knew it. Angie had developed sentience and our Mom’s tush was only the beginning of her plan. It would be far beyond me to explain how one woman’s more well-formed butt was the key to the undoing of the entire species or how that lead to the rise of robo civilization. I guess robots know us better than we do. I know this much: Mom’s new ass proved to be irresistible to the President and when he began noodling her at our place, Angie knew just how to use that. 

But what would have happened if Angie hadn’t ended up in our kitchen, the kitchen of the Secretary to the Office of the President of Earth? Surely not every woman’s ass has the power to upset the balance of civilizations? But maybe Angie knew that and was in our house nonrandomly. Maybe she was just a pawn in a much larger game. That certainly seems reasonable. But from where we sat, it seemed like the world revolved around that one pair of slowly growing buttocks.

Today’s Words:
pugnacious
anthem
lullaby
oral cancer
olfactory
impetuous
spunky 

The anthem of Spunkytown was about cookies. Cookies, of course, were the national mascot, but Spunkytown, being eager to the point of pugnaciousness in their patriotism, had taken it one step further.

The anthem went thusly:

Cookies our our shepherds.

They still our hearts and fill our lonely bellies.

They restore our souls and lead us to righteousness.

Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of Low Fat, Wheat Free, and Vegan Cookies, we shall fear no evil; for righteous cookies are plentiful and they comfort us.

Our bellies runneth over, and yet we eat more, because cookies are holy.

Cookies shall see us through the darkest of our days.

We shall lay our arms down only to eat cookies.

Cookies we devote ourselves to you,

And thus we dwell in the house of COOKIES forever.

It was a bit hard to sing, but they just went slowly so everyone could keep up and it usually came out alright. Someone suggested this was more a psalm than an anthem and perhaps they could rewrite it and add some pentameter or rhymes, but he was forced to eat whole-wheat triscuits until he repented. To counteract his poisonous demagoguery, it was decreed that the citizens of Spunkytown use the anthem as a lullaby to sing their children to sleep.

Citizens also took up arms against any impetuous soul who might imply that the vast quantities of Oreos consumed within Oreo county might be responsible for the higher-than-normal levels of oral cancer in the region, or that the wafting smell of sugar and yeast was overwhelming the olfactory senses of the scientists of the nearby cookie factories, leading to an ever-increasing skew in the sugar-to-flour ratio which might destabilize the very foundations of cookiedom.

Words from Emily:
coerce
storied
rampart
desire
prisoner
clouds
moonlit
creepy

I feel a bit creepy, sitting here in the early morning night (12:52 am to be precise) in Emily’s apartment. She doth sleep, or attempt to sleep, and I doth write, or attempt to write.

Ramparts, coercion, prisoners – sounds like a fantasy novel in the making. So let’s go.

One day, a young girl named Hera was talking to her cousin Saffron. He was bitching about how his name meant some kind of lame flower and how hers was the name of a Goddess and jeez why couldn’t he have had the imaginative twin for a father instead of the dopey one. (Well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Hera thought, to herself of course. No point in arguing with a son-of-a-dope.)

But just then Hera’s attention was piqued as he relayed an interesting tidbit about Sephus, the old man on the hill. While she was aware of many of the details and nuances of his storied past, she had never heard this tale. She was careful not to give away her desire for the hairy details, because Saffron would surely clam up and demand payment, and that meant only one thing: copping a feel. She was sick of that game so she feigned a slight boredom, just enough so Saffron would be eager to try to impress her with all the juicy boredom.

Sephus, apparently, had once been a prisoner of the Queen, the one two back before the current one, Queen Mabel. That particular queen had not lasted more than a few weeks, but apparently in her short span as monarch she had managed to secure Sephus in her dungeon. This was a feat worthy of note because Sephus, while a notorious bandit, was also one who had supposedly never lost a battle. So how did he come to be imprisoned, and by a woman who was by most accounts completely ineffectual?

Saffron didn’t know that part. Damn. And she didn’t think tempting him with a breast-mashing session would get her more information: he was plumb dry.

So she waited until dark and sneaked out of the village, being careful not to light her lantern until she had cleared the bounds of the settlement. Some people still believed that the old man was cursed and she didn’t want to go through all that again.

So she walked through the moonlit night, humming softly to herself to keep away the zoofbugs. They weren’t too much of a nuisance, sucking blood but not poisoning, but still it was easy enough to keep them at bay.

She wondered to herself how she would coerce the tale out of him once she arrived. But she hardly needed to strategize: her gift for loosening men’s tongues was apparent to everyone but her. In truth she never needed to let Saffron push his grimy paws on her, as he would have gladly spilled any secret if she looked at him with the tiniest spark of interest, even if he knew that it was only for the words he carried, not he himself. It was all he could do to keep from divulging his mother’s secret (that his father wasn’t really Hera’s uncle at all, but a tall dark and not horribly-looking stranger that somewhat approximated his build and coloring). That meant that he and Hera weren’t truly cousins, which made his nethers all the more tingly.

Knowing nothing of this, of course, as her character is not in fact omniscient, only the narrator, Hera starts planning her seduction. She doesn’t care that the man is old, because he has got that Sean Connery kind of sexy-old-man thing going on. Only she doesn’t think that because Sean Connery hasn’t been invented yet. She just thinks damn well he ain’t so bad anyway so what the hell and I want to know how the story happened. Meanwhile, your dear author just wants to figure out how to work “clouds” and “rampart” into this dear tale.

See, she could have put clouds in up with the moonlit night, but she thought that would be a bit heavy-handed. No, she is a fan of subtlety and a natural flow of words. Probably to her detriment as the morn wears on and she grows sleepy.

So, Hera gets there, and asks the man what up, and the man says hey sister can I see some flesh and she gives him a look and he says OK, I respect that, you’re working it, well I’ll tell you a little sumpin’ sumpin’ and here’s what it is: Saffron got his head all screwed round. Never were no dungeons involved. I’m undefeated, do you doubt me girl? I see by the way you nod your head slightly in my direction that you believe me. That’s because my personal branding is stronger than Saffron’s, and don’t you forget it. You are used to a consistent experience of the veracity of my words in regards to my accomplishments whereas Saffron, well he is just jacked in comparison. So, let me tell you what really happened: I stormed the ramparts of her heart and took her like a woman needs to be taken, all lace and soft restraints. Yes, we had an affair, and a glorious one at that. Why do you think she was only three weeks on the throne? Her old man found out and kicked her to the curb. But of course men aren’t cut out for ruling so her sister took over posthaste. And Mabel, my dear sweet Mabel, well she took it in the chin but she got over it. But she had had enough of me by then and took off for Vallanore to be a dominatrix. That means she takes men like women need to be taken. Which confuses me somewhat. But different strokes right?

Hera was satisfied with that and decided to do him anyway just for kicks, which made Sephus very happy (twice). Then she snuck back home and curled up with her honey like this author is about to do. THE END.

OOPS damn I forgot to work in “clouds”. OK. The next morning they woke up and Saffron, Sephus, the girl, and her honey, were all amazed to find that the clouds over their village had turned solid and come down and blanketed their house like in the story of “Bartholomew and the Oobleck” which is all about being content with what you have and not asking for fancy weather out of boredom because if you do some witches will make green goop fall from the sky and it will gum up everything and make the church belltower not work anymore. Which, as far as a moral goes, was completely lost on me, because I am never content with what I have and am always asking for more and damn straight why not because we are transcendent immortal beings growing and expanding in an ever widening upward spiral of Divine bliss so why shouldn’t I ask for more, huh? HUH? Thought so. THE END FOR REAL THIS TIME.

Words from Emily:
glassblower
verdigris
Vermeer
janitor
sedate
charcuterie
folly
forepaw
detox

Detox was going well, all things considered. Considerin’ one of those things was a run-in with a janitor on PCP which resulted in a nail run straight through her right eye. She felt like the deer meat her pa used to pound on for days, trying to get it tender enough to chew. But she knew she would get through it. After all, she had Charlie on the outside, waiting for her.

She had found him when he had caught his forepaw in a steel trap that hunters had set out to catch raccoons for pelts. Who traps raccoons anymore anyway? Oh hell, that was a question for Doc Murphy, not for her. She just wanted to get through the next week and get out with her other eye.

She loved that dog. She had never known love, not really, if you didn’t count her pa who traded her to the neighbor in exchange for $1000 and a 1978 Nissan pickup, or the neighbor who had her out pickin’ in the fields before the sun hit the treeline that day.

She couldn’t remember ever having a mama, although she knew that she had to have one because babies don’t just come from nothin’. But who she came out of, she had no idea.

Doc Murphy asked her about her folks on the first day in. She said she didn’t right know what her mama had been doin’ for a livin’ afore she had her. Then she asked Doc what his parents had been doin’ when they had him. He smiled in a funny way and said “Thank you for asking”, like no one had ever asked him that before. And then he said that his father was a glassblower and his mama had worked in a charcuterie, which was some kinda store for fancy meat. She nodded and let him talk. He seemed to like talkin’ and she liked listenin’ more than trying to figure who her mama was.

She liked Doc alright. He had a painting in his office of a girl with a scarf wrapped round her head. She looked like she was about to say something, like “Well, it was good while it lasted, but I’ll be seeing you now”, wishing she could stay but knowing she couldn’t.

She told Doc that, when he asked what she was thinkin’ about. He smiled again. He said the painting was done by a man named Vermeer who had eleven children and nobody liked his paintings ’til after he was dead. She said that seemed like a shame. That made Doc nod and look kinda sad.

He told her that what had happened to her was a shame too, and that it wasn’t her fault. She said that she reckoned so too. He asked if she was mad. She thought about it but then said no. She didn’t see what bein’ mad would help. Can’t make an eye out of bein’ mad. She just wanted to get out and get back to Charlie.

She wasn’t really an addict, and she thought Doc would catch on, but he didn’t seem to notice. That was fine, because that meant she could come back in a month or too with a relapse and have a bed to sleep on for another three weeks. It meant leaving Charlie with the church lady, but it couldn’t be helped. No dogs allowed in detox.

But maybe she wouldn’t have to come back. She had heard the nurses talking when they thought she was sedated. They were saying how the government would give her money, now that she had lost her eye, so maybe she could get enough to get by and not have to come back. She could maybe get a little place for her and Charlie, out by the river.

She didn’t think too much on it though. She knew imaginin’ was a kind of folly. It could make it harder to get through livin’. If you don’t think about you would rather be doin’ and just do what’s starin’ at you, you could get through the day without it bein’ too bad. If there was money comin’, it would still come, whether she got to thinkin’ or not. And if there wasn’t, well, thinkin’ there was would just make it harder.